Today was the day of the BTP presentation! It was FAR BETTER than my
expectations, and the uncertainty has all been over-written for now. In about 2
weeks, I will leave for Chennai and subsequently from there to Bangalore. In
those two weeks, I have to give 5 end-term exams for the 5 subjects that I took,
most probably give a lab test for the Operations Research Lab.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about a Semester Review post on the 30th of April,
which is the first non semester day or something like that in which I go over
what all I think I learnt this semester and is worth mentioning. The more I
thought about it, the more sense it made, it would be like a real timeline of
the things that were done over the past few years.

This being my 8th semester, I have missed the oppurtunity to right such posts
for my 7 previous semesters, I would have loved to have them for each semester!
Writing them in retrospect is almost definitely not the right way to go, and I
won’t even remember most of the things that must have seemed major a day after
the last end-term exam now.

Today, we also had the second Metakgp Talk session with two talks. The second
talk was by Ashris and
Ankita. It was about the
intersection between Art and Engineers and how most people are on a spectrum
going from Artists to Engineer. It was a GREAT talk and I absolutely loved the
oppurtunities for more thinking that it opened. I definitely intend to look at a
lot more about the artistic expression that must have gone into the tech
products that we all use every day.

The discussion that followed this was almost an informal Metakgp meetup over
dinner, and interestingly, it brought up this report about Surveillance in
India,
for the most part the surveillance reporting that I have seen on the internet
has been based on the NSA leaks and mainly US specific intelligence and
journalism. That India has such a huge report about these things and that they
are implementing a scary surveillance program is disturbing and has essentially
made me double down on my own goal of using only products that are end-to-end
encrypted and can be trusted, because of the cryptography that powers them.

On a completely different note, There is a project by
Himanshu called
Muriel which lets you select a folder
containing a lot of episodes and subsequently just selecting any one show to
play any random episode of that show, ensuring that you are not just repeating
the same episodes that you keep watching and also ensuring that the choice is
independent every single time. I watch and re-watch and re-re-watch Seinfeld
Episodes every single time. I used the following macro to figure out which
episode to watch:

If the episode doesn’t exist, I simply play it again to get another episode that
exists! It worked pretty well and it’s almost no extra load at all (Muriel is an
electron app packaged in a 45 MB zip of some kind. I don’t know anything about
Electron packaging of apps, I believe it is similar to python packaging into Deb
files back in the day).

Anyway, I will probably implement a more generic script that will list all the
folders, choose one randomly, then go into that folder, select a folder / file
there randomly and so on. All Linux and Bash users in general will be able to
use this script and it should do a lot of people a lot of good. I know it will
do me a lot of good! :smile:

Meanwhile, @SeinfeldTV on Twitter replied to a tweet of mine! EXCITED OUT OF MY
MIND (It’s not that big a deal, I know, still excited though):